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When I sat down to write this article, I realized that I’d actually forgotten how to write one. I know this sounds absurd coming from a seasoned writer, but in the adapted words of Ross Geller, “I was on a break!” It’s not that I’ve stopped writing altogether for the last several months; I’ve published…

On Nov. 28, He Jianku — a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford from 2011-2012 — announced to hundreds of scientists, colleagues and journalists that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies: twin girls with the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana whose DNA he claims to have altered to make them HIV-resistant.

On Thursday, a team led by assistant professor of bioengineering Stanley Qi released a study on a new form of gene-editing technology known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats genome organization, or CRISPR-GO, which allows scientists to move pieces of DNA within a cell nucleus. In contrast, previous CRISPR technology has been used to “cut” and “paste” sections of the genetic code within individual pieces of DNA.